A consignment of contraband cigarettes worth zł. 3.5 million ($853,659) was intercepted by customs officials in the southeastern town of Przemyśl last Thursday, the largest single haul captured in Poland to date.
Smugglers stowed 575,000 packs, or 11.5 million cigarettes, inside chipboard planks traveling by train from Ukraine. Authorities detained four men who were accepting the cargo delivery at a customs point in Przemyśl.
"We were alerted by border authorities when the shipment was being reloaded onto a Polish train, and the scales showed the shipment mass to be too light," said Marek Kachaniak, the director of the Przemyśl Board of Customs.
At 20% of the market, last year's sales of smuggled cigarettes represented the second-largest segment of the Polish tobacco market. Although domestic cigarette sales recovered slightly last year for the first time since 1997, swelling from 73.1 million sticks in 2000 to 74.4 million in 2001, illegal imports were responsible for a 26% plunge in sales from 1997 to 2000, industry officials said.
"I think this will become our No. 1 problem, looking at the value of contraband and how often smuggling takes place," Kachaniak said. "Cigarettes as a smuggled item are the most frequently encountered, smuggled on the largest scale and in the most valuable consignments
The transfer of quantities of this size is undoubtedly controlled by organized crime."
In January the Finance Ministry will introduce the second in a series of seven 6.3% cigarette increases in excise tax, designed to bring Poland in line with EU regulations by 2009. The tax hikes are exoected to further increase the volume of smuggled cigarettes and eat into the sales of domestic producers, said Chris Sijtsma, the president of tobacco firm British American Tobacco in Poland.
"This is very much a taxation story, and a story that is only going to get worse in the next couple of years," Sijtsma said. "The total excise is roughly €25 on 1,000 Jan III Sobieski cigarettes. By the end of 2008, this will need to be €64. In other words, excise is going to almost triple in the next seven years to comply with the EU excise directive."
The growing price gap between cigarettes sold in Poland, Russia and Ukraine is raising the stakes for organized crime, which is using increasingly sophisticated means to ferry contraband across the border, Kachaniak said.
"They are better and better organized and increasingly audacious," Kachaniak said. "It's clear that the consignment (seized in Przemyśl) was not organized by a single person, since it is worth huge amounts of money."
